Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Coming up to gEDA 1.7.2

Later this week, gEDA/gaf 1.7.2 will be released! Hopefully, this will be the final unstable release before gEDA/gaf 1.8.0, and it will contain a few neat new things that we've been working on over the last six months.

As I've discussed previously, this release will incorporate all of the basic Scheme API functionality, to make it easier to write extensions for gschem in pure Scheme. I've had quite a few e-mails and feature requests from people who have been doing interesting things with the new API, and I'm looking forward to hearing about more tools for enhancing gschem! All of the new functions are documented in the gEDA Scheme Reference Manual.

In terms of documentation, I've completely re-written the gschem User Guide, more fully describing many features in gschem that were previously poorly documented, and hopefully making it easier to find the information you need. Gareth Edwards has done a fantastic job of adding man pages to gEDA, and now all of the programs we install have a properly-written man page.

The first parts of my rework of keymapping will also be included. Now key names will be properly internationalised when they're displayed, and having Caps Lock enabled will no longer mess up your keybindings. You can also now bind key combinations that use the Mod, Super or Hyper modifier keys.

You can now read gEDA documentation on Windows! (About time, really).

What's next once 1.7.2 has been released? Well, the most important thing is going to be to get a new stable release out. Many distributions are keen to move to Guile 2.0.x, and the current stable version of gEDA (1.6.2) doesn't support it. My current hope is to go into a string freeze for gEDA 1.8.0 very soon after gEDA 1.7.2 is released, and aim to get all the translations updated in time for a stable release at the end of January 2012.

There are many exciting plans for the 1.9.x branch of gEDA, but I'll leave them for another time...